Love that lasts a minute like a filter
on a faucet, love that is always like headlights in the glistening dark, heed the pen’s screech. Do not read what is written. In time it too shall become incoherent but for the time being it is good
just to tamper with it and be off, lest someone see you. And when this veil of twisted creeper is parted, and the listing tundra is revealed behind it, say why you had come to say it: the divorce. The no reason, as
the plane dives up into the sky and is lost. All that one had so carefully polished and preserved, arranged in rows, boasted modestly to the neighbors about, is going and there is nothing, repeat nothing, to take its place.

Only by tampering with the Earth like this can we pretend to live. Tampering with, of course, is a euphemism. The terrain tilts towards exhaustion . . . I’ve read that the sheer weight of the Xiaolangdi Dam is causing geological disturbances, i.e. tremors, in the surrounding area.

Ashbery flows rightly into it: we are going going gone-soon into the sky with the ashes of our beloved Wolfhounds... and the "Cadillac Desert" agri-business is drying up before our tongues. Last night so much mowed summer hay strong-wind-blew from one coulee to another.

I'm not certain what to make of the Ashbery-Burtynsky juxtaposition, but the quality of both artists' work simply amazes me. The Ashbery poem is, for me, incredibly moving and precise. It reminds me (although I couldn't say it as well as he does) of dark thoughts I've had lying sleepless in the dark. Occasionally I laugh quietly to myself, which is slightly better than laughing aloud in full view of people who reasonably find that kind of behavior annoying and ridiculous. It's a very powerful poem. As for the Burtynsky images, I can barely imagine how he's able to pull off such feats, but I'm glad he does. I wonder, as one is forced to, looking at objects that can be framed and put on walls, how I would feel looking on any of them on my wall day-after-day. They would never ever become comfortable, comforting wall furniture, that's for certain. Curtis

I suppose my internal justification of the collision went something like this: both these artists view modern life from a distance.

With Burtynsky the distance is obviously created by the literal removal of the feeling subject from the viewing situation. These images made with cameras installed in helicopters and drones are in that sense equivalent to NASA imagery. Though an implication may be drawn as to a polemical purpose, the emotion is checked, restrained, held off by a classical formality ("carefully polished...") imposed with the composition.

In the case of Ashbery the distance (again pretty obviously) is ironic. We are encouraged to hear these confidences (or should one call them pseudo-confidences?) as tossed-off, tongue-in-cheek. The tone discourages us from taking things too seriously. And then serious things are said.

Both artists are "cool". With the state of things as they are at present, it wouldn't do to become too heated.

(By the by, as to owning one of those colossal Burtynsky prints, he tells a story of offering to trade a large print of one of the photos in his Quarry series to the quarry owners in return for a slab from the quarry, from which he wanted to make a kitchen counter for his home. The quarry owners, looking at the images of defaced hillsides, said Why on earth would we want to have such a thing? It would only remind us that nothing more can be extracted from that site. Can't you give us something a bit more... And so Burtynsky offered some new images, this time with no defacement shown. The quarry owners said, Fine. Burtynsky got his kitchen counter -- and, he says, kept those later, "laundered" images out of circulation.)

The mountain will probably be fracked, or erupt, Mistah Charley. There’s no getting away from it. Meanwhile here we are, comically trapped in this MEAT. LOL. “The listing tundra.” I do not believe "there is nothing to take its place". Sorry, John Ashbery. Now, turning to that photograph of the greenhouses – (Greenhouses, Almira Peninsula, Spain 2010: photo by Edward Burtynsky) – THAT is a PHOTOGRAPH! That is something the artist consciousness in the meat can only aspire to do and attempt many times and perhaps occasionally succeed, as here, to capture some part of the hugeness, the essence around the meat, the flesh, the spirit incarnate. Part of it. A clue. There is more to this than meets the eye. This photograph meets the eye. “How do you do?”